2018-01-10

And if Ahed Tamimi Were Your Daughter?

How is it that Israelis are totally indifferent to the plight of the blond girl behind bars who could easily be their child?

by Gideon LevyHaaretz

For the past two weeks, she has burst into Israelis’ living rooms every few days through another perfunctory report on the extension of her arrest. Once again, we see the golden curls; once again, we see the Botticelli figure in the brown Shin Bet security service uniform and the handcuffs, looking more like a girl from Ramat Hasharon than a girl from Nabi Saleh.

Yet even Ahed Tamimi’s “non-Arab” appearance hasn’t managed to touch any hearts here. The wall of dehumanization and demonization that has been built through vile campaigns of incitement, propaganda and brain-washing against the Palestinians has trumped even the blonde from Nabi Saleh.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Vietnamese

"If you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in Vietnam ... just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you." - Nick Turse

Africans

Indigenous North Americans

South Americans

Howard Zinn

Indigenous South Americans

Native Americans

America

“Everywhere I go, every town I visit, you don’t see any industries. You don’t see any factories. You don’t see anything. We don’t make anything. We are really the poorest country on earth, but people refuse to see that. We are only surviving. We are only looking good because of our military might, because we are an empire. But this force cannot go on forever. It should be so obvious that we’re only chugging along, bullying people into lending us money and sending us stuff that we don’t deserve, that we haven’t earned. How can we survive? Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to living like savages in this self-proclaimed greatest country on earth.” - Linh Dinh

Indians

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." - Winston Churchill, talking about the Bengal famine in 1943.

Racism

"Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire." - Chris Hedges

Japanese

"[The U.S.] never would have dropped the bomb if the Japanese had had white skin. It was a monstrous, racist act." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

African-Americans

"Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast."

"...white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it." - Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his Atlantic article, The Case for Reparations

Chagossians

"First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate." - David Vine writing about the ethnic cleansing of Diego Garcia

Iraqis

Palestinians

American Underclass

“I think D.C. is a perfect example of what America is. You have this big white house representing the government, that was built by slaves, that’s beautiful, excellent manicured lawns, and right outside the gate you have 50 homeless people sleeping in a park. Right outside of the gate of the White House. That perfectly describes America.” - T-Dubb-O, one of the founders, along with Tef Poe, Tory Russell, Tara Thompson and Rika Tyler, of Hands Up United